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Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot

Hi all,

I am not entirely sure what I have done to upset Backtrack 4 but I cannot get it to boot.
I only get to some shell called BusyBox or ash or something instead. I have minor Linux knowledge and
this is the first time I have tried to boot it from a thumbdrive.

Maybe my laptop isn't even compatible? I have a Toshiba Satellite L505D GS6000.

I created my USB Live by following this tutorial: USB Live
I used a 4GB Lexar JumpDrive
No problems so far. I reboot and enter the boot menu by pressing F12. I choose: 6. USB.

When things went sour I searched the forums and found two things to check:
1. Check the MD5, to make sure my download was not corrupt.
The MD5 was "af139d2a085978618dc53cabc67b9269" which I believe is correct and not corrupt.

2. Try again or try a different media.
I Burned a straight DVD-R .iso but booting with this disk got me to the exact same place as above.

I have not tried to boot up on another system yet. I will do that now. But I would rather have this work on my laptop.

Re: Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot

hi im having the exact same problem im using a toshiba satellite a500 core i5 4gb ddr3 any suggestions please help i was running backtrack on an older toshiba satellite without any problems but it was stolen

Re: Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot

ok i have the same issue with a new i7 a505-s6033 toshiba laptop. Im not sure what to do to fix this issue. But i think it might have something to do with acpi and turning it off? or maybe im wrong someone please give me a something if you have any ideas on this issue. I wanna use backtrack 4 on my laptop because of my 310M graphics card. And the 8 SSE2 cores ... which i wanna use with pyrit. Thanx if anyone has any ideas.

Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot SOLVED

THANKYOU needlez6! I so needed this problem resolved.

The bit you mentioned about the acpi let me do a little research on good ol' google. I found a few threads about problems with Backtrack on laptops. Similar problems like ours were fixed by turning the acpi off as you mentioned so I tested it and it worked! The following is the solution that worked for me:

hit the TAB button and a string of text will be displayed. Hit the SPACE bar and then add the following to the line of text:

acpi=off

then hit enter. Backtrack 4 booted just fine for me.

I have no idea what this does or why it works so if anyone would like to enlighten us that would be great for the community.
Let me know if this fix worked for you.
If any problems with this fix crop up please also let me know.

Re: Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot

ok im glad that i could be of help. I wonder if this fixes the acpi issue i also have with my i7 though. I will try it soon i just downloaded UNETBOOTIN and im adding the backtrack4 iso to a flashdrive with it right now and then to try your suggestion about adding that line about acpi=off. I thank you in advance and i hope that if this issue is still present after this that we can figure some way to resolve it for the new i series core computers.

Re: Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot

ok so this issue is still present on some i7 computers because even after you do install it with acpi=off you still get an acpi issue when booting up from the hard disk and if you turn off acpi then you dont have all your cpu processors and it still wont recognize my Nvidia 310M graphics card. This kinda a big issue for me, but may i can get the new ubuntu to install and then just compile pyrit on it that would work or maybe get backtrack 4 to work on the i5 base that i have sitting around a my friends. And if anyone has any solutions for i7 laptops to run backtrack 4 with all 4 cores and 8 threads and the gpu enabled please and thank you for your help!

Re: Backtrack 4 Full USB Live failure to boot SOLVED

Originally Posted by Somnus

THANKYOU needlez6! I so needed this problem resolved.

The bit you mentioned about the acpi let me do a little research on good ol' google. I found a few threads about problems with Backtrack on laptops. Similar problems like ours were fixed by turning the acpi off as you mentioned so I tested it and it worked! The following is the solution that worked for me:

hit the TAB button and a string of text will be displayed. Hit the SPACE bar and then add the following to the line of text:

acpi=off

then hit enter. Backtrack 4 booted just fine for me.

I have no idea what this does or why it works so if anyone would like to enlighten us that would be great for the community.
Let me know if this fix worked for you.
If any problems with this fix crop up please also let me know.